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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  December 24, 2012 1:30pm-3:00pm EST

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she gave a speech and you can take away a thing or two and you can take away the hillary clinton name and just look at the text. the speech she gave on the development assistance was one of the most accurate scene on the topic of the international development. what did she say? a couple things that no one ever says that everybody knows to be true. number one objective, -- chu listed three but it's the most significant. the development assistance is not in the business of self propagation. it should be a time line of when does it end, when we stop, when do believe in haiti and pakistan and anywhere else in the world. timeline to zero. vitally important, she said that. she said getting directly back to your question she talked
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about corruption as an obstacle to the development. but she titled directly between corruption and poor countries and corruption in the united states inside the beltway contracts that are fed back and she talks about the development. we can talk about a lot of other systems, and tying the line that we are also a part of the world subject to the same kind of forces to the incumbent economic interests capturing the political process, getting the government contracts and affecting outcomes we are also subject to that. and to see somebody say those things is a lot more than i say in my book but what you are saying is true in its deeply important. >> philip auerswald, you write about the current telecommunications revolution that we are all living and trying to understand and manage. helpless. >> so, first of all, we have to
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understand the difference between a mobile phone and a rich country and a mobile phone and most of the world. so, before the mobile phone only to technologies had spread as widely as the mobile phone. no technology has spread as rapidly as the mobile phone. the only other recent one was the transistor radio and before that, it was fired to spread as wildly. so, what is the -- we know what it means in our lives and what smart phones been and all that but what does it mean for the majority of the world's population. it was built highways, communication highways and labor never connected before. in afghanistan we talk about story that you asked about entrepreneurs and was responsible for creating the afghan cell phone company. this is the biggest story in
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afghanistan and the last ten years. we don't hear about it. why? because the fact that more afghans today have access and know how to read or write, when a decade ago they would have had to walk 700 miles to make a phone call. but that's not a story. what is a story? it is a big story. i would imagine it is something that means a lot to them in terms of their key devotees. but what is even more exciting, you think about when we build the railroads, there's a lot about this, a lot of movies made. what happens when you build a railroad when they land on the other side of the railroad and the station gets valuable. you can provide services now that you couldn't provide before. so, it is the next generation. it's when we start to build on the new site of this telecommunications highway. mobile health, mobile banking. a whole a ray of services that we can now deliver because we are connected using this frontier technology. and that is such a powerful,
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powerful thing. it will have legs for the next 20 years, not to mention everything else that my friend talks about in his book on abundance, but it creates so many possibilities. >> who is the it coming prosperity written for? >> well, you know, it's written for the folks watching the show. and it's written for general audience in the united states but globally. i start in the u.s., i and in the u.s.. i feel as though the story is particularly needed in the united states. i don't believe that people in pakistan or china need to hear this because the seat. even in pakistan has really struggled with so much potential. i think it is the next greatest store, the next global opportunity and the resources we wouldn't tell people that because they would be investing heavily and the dividends with
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other people but it's just on the cusp of happening. really exciting. and so, it's frequent in this country. and it's for anybody that believes there's a possibly in the future they are wondering why it isn't happening more quickly. >> so why are china, india, pakistan -- why are they where they are economically if they are on the cusp? what is going not right in those countries that's growing right here in the united states? >> pakistan doesn't have the momentum so they are in a different category. >> brazil, take brazil. >> again, the thing that constrains growth in every country and the symbol -- which i do and i go to places like the world bank and if i am invited to share my thoughts with folks that work on policy issues mayor and the same thing in the united states government, and i can boil down my policy
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recommendations to one thing, one message for a policy standpoint from this book, favor incumbents less. economic incumbents. favor incumbents less. now pakistan had an era in the 1960's pakistan was created to date. we think about korea, but in 1960 dow was pakistan. so the fact that was going to be a huge success. what happened in pakistan is you have this open space and a bunch of people rushing into to get advantage of the opportunity of the newly created country, sort of a strange country from the left that team over to partition the very tumultuous times to create a lot of economic opportunity. the problem was there was no opportunity. to the instability in pakistan from the analytical stand point and also from the historical standpoint there wouldn't be
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enough and stability. not the political winds devotee the turnover of presidency's but behind the scenes the actual economic structure has been dominated by the same small group of people and the same thing in egypt. mubarak left but the military in both countries controls up words of 40% of the economy directly. and then the rest of it is a small group of eletes so that is what holds the development back, the lack of big trees falling in creating the new and that gets back to the gm question. it gets back to the question and you need to have the capabilities of the society to repurchase out of the -- what is released when something dies. when something gold falls, but there hasn't been enough of that in a place like pakistan or in egypt. i didn't go into china is a totally different story but that goes to the point that you are talking about. skype philip auerswald, what you teach at george mason? >> well, i teach economics and
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social entrepreneurship so i teach on the policy. i teach just sort of regular entrepreneur should and i believe in this as a transfer of force in society. but as social entrepreneurship course is thinking about how to address public challenges in the entrepreneurial matter, particularly envision the new ventures and right to have ways to make the most of that. and so, there are a lot of folks in this book who you might say folks that are familiar might steer social one to the doors and i think of them as entrepreneurs but that is very focused and it's a great teaching and i love this environment. i have colleagues as a great man on economics and a lot of other colleagues and disciplines and they really deserve a shot. she is one of a global leader in documenting and researching but also working practically on the human trafficking. president laws of the clinton global the initiative announcing a major new direction on this topic and there are many people
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that work on this topic to have helped move it forward on the agenda but one of them as a lot of credit. >> we've been talking with philip auerswald, the coming prosperity, entrepreneurs are transforming the global economy. his most recent book. book tv on location at george mason university. now on book tv, alex berezow argues that while antiscience is usually a term associated with
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conservatives, the left in the united states has plenty of problems with science when it comes to issues they don't support. it's about an hour and a half. >> my name is kenneth agreement and a resident scholar here at the enterprise institute and i work on primarily energy and environmental policy issues. i'm a scientist as well as alex and my doctoral degree is environmental science and engineering. so i am really excited to have this event today on science called "science left behind," alex's great book, and before we start, if i seem a little fuzzy you've seen the commercial that goes something like this when you pay too much for cable you through things and if you throw things people think you have anger issues some people think you have anger issues in your schedule up and you grow a scraggly beard and you start taking in stray animals and you
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can't stop taking in stray animals don't pay much for cable. i have my own version today to the appeal to the kafeel you have a checkup and when he gives you a check that you have a flu shot at a tetanus booster. when you have the booster do we get the next a feeling like you've been beaten by a guerrilla with a baseball bat. and you feel you've been beaten by a gorilla with a baseball bat to wander into the street and get hit by a truck. don't get a checkup when you feel perfectly well. i haven't yet wandered out into the street and often hit by a truck that if i seem to be heading that way, please, stop me. so today's event. there's been a battle going on for some time in doing books and sharp exchanges out there on the internet in the blogosphere. whether or not one side of the political spectrum is particularly more antiscientific than the other. a leading advocate for the conservatives are antiscience is a fellow named christopher who wrote the republican war on science. he argues that so many
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republicans hold of the views on evolution and climate change as to make the entire political philosophy antiscience. others including myself and alex and how we actually met have pointed to the situation as clear as progressives have a whole host of positions that can be described as antiscience from their scaremongering over the genetically modified food to their embrace of things such as the linear low threshold model of toxicity to the asphyxiation on the yet of agriculture and the vaccine movement of allied having second thoughts about that. there is a host of issues on the antiscience as you can imagine. some are going to catch on to this today and i would point you to the work that has a blanka called kaleidoscope that has been steadily moving towards a position of saying, you know, let's call it the way it is.
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both sides have their issues and have their problems. the left together on the genetically modified food of course is killing many, many people there is a sort of response that has been somewhat scattershot with just the hits and articles and things like that until now. because now alex berezow of science and his co-author mac the founder of science 2.0 and online science communication community have brought together the various strands of antiscience in the progressive part of the political spectrum, and they actually do something i really respect which is the start a book by defining what progressives are. it's refreshing when someone starts and actual book by saying okay let's talk about the definition of things so we know what we are talking about. the doctorate in microbiology
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which had some molecular biology for a master's, but it's clear that he is scientific education did not go in vain. when i got my copy i went to the chapter that i would be able to judge vest on the energy environment or chapter 5 conservation and clean energy chaos. i happen to love the liberation myself, so i got a freebie in that title and i was pleased to see the tape on the creasy aspects of the environmental policy favored by progressives from those that don't work to ruechel or heads that his attitude and don't get you clean. and they pointed out some points about water conservation where if you were worried about water conservation you wouldn't be looking at the shower heads and toilets because most of the water that is used as industrial for energy use and irrigation and so forth and you have to get all the way down to the 1% level when you talk about the consumer use of water that he would be
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trying to knock that down by a percentage or so by going to the smaller toilets and showers. so i am hoping that one of the things that we also discuss is one of my pet peeves which is the willingness of progress to sacrifice the environs of the project. first, and this is actually what got me in public policy when i was a kid i was raised by my mother who was a bit crazy. she was a treasure hunter actively. she left go prospecting for gold and detecting for coins and things like that. so i spent many summers in the mojave desert when we had a claim, and she said she would tell people we would go digging for gold, and what she meant is i would go digging for gold and she would go panning for gold once i had done all the digging. but what we were active with the most people don't know the prospect in groups and told national groups of prospectors and we would be the court involved in one in california and even then this was 1973 perhaps 74, the environmentalists are trying to get the act revised to stop the
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ownership of the mining claims in the desert because of the king drew in danger on the desert and that was my introduction to the tension between the next u.s. and non-use from the environment lists are adamant they were going to wall off the entire mojave desert for use, and they did. in fact it became impossible to use recreational vehicles and to go out and maintain the plans that became more onerous so we wound up giving goes up. now of course, when they want to put the solar installation out there and they say yes that sounds like a great idea and they talk about things like gentle rolling on the top of the cactus that to 100 years to grow back and they relocate the tortoise is even though the mortality rate when they move them as ridiculously high and of course if you did maliciously you would be in jail and that no longer matters because they want their solar fields. and the same is true since they
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happen to notice people don't about in the mojave desert so it is okay to run the power line through the state parks to get them to the city's whereas before this he couldn't even look at a state park was the idea of running power lines through it. without i'm going to turn this over to alex that will step us through the fallacies and the rise of the entire scientific left and we have time for q&a afterwards because i'm going to reach behind alex and popped him with a book if it runs too late. over to you and thanks for doing this. >> thanks for that kind introduction. so, i -- our book is "science left behind" and it's about the feel-good fallacies of their diet and the antiscientist left and as he said my name is alex and i got my ph.d. in microbiology from washington, and more importantly now the editor of nuclear science.com. so, just a little bit about my background entirely microbiology. in fact that's me. a friend of mine had become an
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ob/gyn so i look like a geek in that picture so i put there. that's me working in the chamber which you may have come across at one point. uigur left with extremely slowly bacteria. i went to the university of washington in 2004 and i got my ph.d. in 2010 and then i immediately became an editor of science and i was in the real world for two years. so, my personal science philosophy is rather straightforward and simple. if you're not an expert it is best to accept the mainstream science. it should always come before politics. and that means ideology or political parties are not beyond criticism. so, in view of a plea for teen science i don't country talk playing for the team right or blue but for science and i think we should always try to purge antiscientific thinking even if it comes from our friends and political allies.
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the media is very quick to cover and how scientific believes from conservatives and particular global warming and evolutions and for instance they made some rather on a montanan, the presidency and for days this is the front page story how he doesn't understand reproductive biology. however when someone on the far left does something when president barack obama says vaccines might cause autism that was ignored. and yes he did say that and we will talk about that later in the top. so, there's been several books published on the topic. there's a couple of their books. if you want to find out how the right is better and it's a big market for that to our knowledge this is the first book on the entire scientific left. so, progressives are antiscience as well. let's give -- progressives are
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antiscience as well what is just not reported by the media. the media looks the other way when their political allies do things that are antiscience. so who are the progressives, what do we mean by progressive? we took david's chart and we label it to fit more of our political ideology today. conservatives and libertarians are the easiest to identify and they are the mainstream republican party. libertarians need no introduction. the ron paul revolution in the constitution. bill left, however, is a little bit trickier to define because i see them as splitting into liberals and conservatives, liberals and progressives of the liberals being more like that tony blair, the bill clinton win a democratic party because they do tend to favor economic outcomes and they're ought to control economic outcomes that's their main focus think of the unionized police officers and
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progressives are an entirely different beast and these are the people, the typical tree hugging san francisco liberals these are the people that interested in not just economic outcomes but also social outcomes. they talk about drugs and sex how progressives are talking about whether or not you can put salt on your french fries and whether or not you can have a plastic bag or drink a soda. michael bloomberg a great example, he is banning the cuts in new york city. so that and we are talking about, that ideology on the left, the progressive ideology. swatter some of the mifsud are commonly held by today's progress of squawks i've got about five myths that we tend to focus on the first to because those are the big juicy ideas and the bad ideas one is the
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natural things are good and number two, on the natural things are bad. number three, unchecked science will destroy us. number four, science is only relative any way, and number five, science is on our side. okay. the first one we learn all about them there. we are going to talk mostly about the most famous progressive today, president barack obama and his resume when it comes to science, but just to give you an idea about why these are important, natural things are good. that's behind the organic food movement. the rejection of the organic the modified to. unnatural things are bad. that is the fear of chemical and bpa, the fear of chemistry and the things that are unnatural and pesticides, fertilizers, unchecked science will destroy us and that is the nuclear power
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science is only valid if any way. what do they know? the science of course be on our side is we already talked about at length how progressives believe that science is on their side so what are the results of these? well, protests and lots of protests. just to give you some ideas of the topics we cover in the book of the top left we have the cdc flu shots are toxic. i know kenneth might agree they are toxic after his experience, but we have someone in protesters singing that vaccines are toxic and the center for disease control will be the most respected biological organization in the world is lobbying to you about vaccines. on the right, on the upper right we have a big baby bottle that is the bp movement. don't give your baby smell from baby bottles because they will all die from the plastic that it's made from. and at the bottom, this is actually what we want to put on
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the cover of our book and this is the antigenetic modification of met. because corn is genetically modified to have a toxin so they don't like that. we told our publisher this is the picture we want for the book and they said you were crazy we are not putting this on the cover of the book. so, unfortunately that's the book cover we wanted. also, basic scientific research has been opposed by members of the progress of left. the upper left corner, don't test all my friends, they are opposed to all animal research. keep in mind this is and just chimpanzee research which we probably shouldn't be doing for the primary research like burlesque. they are opposed to almost all in all research. pretty much all of our medical research comes from mice and rats and actually some of the smaller primates.
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there's a sign in the yard that says stop bothering us we support science. you may not be able to see what happens to read this is an los angeles. there was a neighborhood of scientists that live in an area and protesters would not protest at the university. they would find out where the researchers lived and they would protest outside of their house. and this is frightening for the scientists and i was at the university of washington we would get e-mails once a year saying protestors were backed, be careful, don't engage with them. because they have a history of violence and a history of intimidating researchers and just to give you an idea about how these people are, one of these neighbors that's a sign that says stop bothering us. she's in support of his neighbor kid one of the animal researchers cost of science and said torture. we support torture. that is how they view people like me. we are not helping people, we
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are not helping medical science, we are animal tortures. but the bottom right, lawrence summers was fired from harvard essentially and was pushed out the door for making the radical claim that men and women might be different. he put forward a very controversial but biologically plausible idea that there's a genetic basis to intelligence and that may be men and women are different when it comes to intelligence. yes it is edgy and controversial and there is scientific evidence to support that but there is evidence which does not support what he does. the point is it is biologically plausible as a geneticist and a biologist to review was essentially fired for that in the lower left corner is a member of greenpeace engaging in acts of terrorism and australia there are testing a field of
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genetically modified crops and they said it was toxic so they came in and took a weed whackers and they moved down the entire field and complained there isn't enough testing for gm crops. >> they did the same thing with the tree farm that was used to test for the sequestration of the greenhouse gases. they were looking to see if they could increase the production of greenhouse gases with the environmentalists didn't like this and burned down the growth. skin and so this is obviously a big problem for the progressives because science now could actually maybe help solve global warming with genetic modification. but they are so illogically opposed to modify anything that they're willing to engage the active evo terrorism. and then energy production. as you know, the far left seems to be opposed to any and all forms of energy, period. in the upper left corner after coming you that people protesting nuclear power and
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angela merkel malae actually respect immensely as the new chancellor of germany, she decided because of the protest to shut down nuclear power she is a nuclear physicist, so she should know better. orie tidal wave and a long time but she gave in to the unfair mental pressure and decided to shut down the nuclear power plants and in that corner you have it causes cancer and the weasel advancing in the lower left corner before they don't want hydroelectric power in the region patagonia in the argentinian chilean border. so they are opposed to hydroelectric power and in the bottom right to have a guide is supposed to wind power and you may not be able to read this but it's classic and capitalism still blows to i'm not sure what
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that has to of capitalism that he made short. >> that might actually turn off. >> let's review just for a second of the progress of protesters don't want vaccines, chemicals, genetically modified crops, research and genetically modified crops, animal research, biology research and nuclear power, natural gas, wind power hydroelectric power, can someone actually believe all that still be considered prez finance? how exactly do progressives think of scientists? probably like this, crazy people who are out to destroy the plant i know this crowd would object but usually when i was giving a talk in seattle they would say
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something to the point of progressive activists of course aarsele to the ghazaliya. it's the politicians that are dividing the real conversation today they are the real pros finance people. okay. really? let's look. president barack obama, the number one progressive politicians in america jesus in his inaugural address january 24, 2009 will restore science to its rightful place. that is a lofty goal for a politician. how did he do it? ..
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>> it lifted the ban, the quote-unquote ban, on federal funding. so today as of the time i put this talk together, about a pont ago, there were 178 embryonic stem cell lines available for federal funding, but there are 760 lines available globally. so he increased it from about 21 lines to 178 lines. most notably, they must be derived, these embryonic stem cells must be derived from leftover invitro fertilization embryos, and permission is required from apartments. that has -- from parents. that has the effect of really limiting the number of embryonic stem cells that you can get, okay? so the idea that he blew the doors open on embryonic stem cell research is a fiction. he did not. george bush nudged the door open to embryonic stem cell research, and barack obama nudged it slightly further. he did not blow the doors off this research.
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it, and here's an ethical issue, and i think this is a worthwhile issue that no one really knows about, but it's a worthwhile issue to discuss. his policy does little to nothing to address the hundreds of thousands of embryos that are sitting in freezers all over the country right now. that no one wants, essentially, and they're just sitting in freezers. the reason that happens is because people who go and have invitro fertilization, they will usually make six or seven embryos, and then they will implant two or three into the woman, hoping one of them will take, then they'll have a baby. the other remaining three or or four, they put them in a freezer indefinitely. and they're just sitting there. they've been sitting there for decades in some cases. so his policy really does nothing to address hundreds of thousands of these samples sitting in freezers all over the country. so what is still not eligible for federal funneling? well, the creation of embryos only for research purposes is
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not allowed. so we can create embryos for invitro fertilization, and then if you ask parents can we use your extra embryos for research, that is allowed, but you cannot create an embryo specifically for research purposes, that is not allowed. bizarrely, the derivation of human embryonic cells was used to clone dolly the sheep. now, we're allowed to do animal research, but you're not allowed to use this technique for humans. >> one quick translation, somatic cells are skin cells. >> yes, anything other than the sexual cells. what this technology does is if you can take a nucleus out of a body cell, so let's say i take a nucleus out of one of my skin cells, you could then take that and put it in a human egg cell or another embryonic stem cell, and you can shock that and, hopefully, if everything works right, you can then create a clone of cells it is that is bay
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just my dna. now, the scary part of the technology is, well, will we be cloning people in the future, and that is banned. i think that's probably a good idea to pan that. what we do need, however, is this technology for cloning organs. so if you want to clone a new heart, a new liver, this technique is almost certainly going to be necessary in our tool belt to do this. that is still not allowed, cannot get federal funding for that research either. and then the injection of embryonic them cells into nonhuman primates is also not allowed, but that sounds like a pretty decent idea at this point. [laughter] there are many bioethical issues here that i think need to be very seriously discussed. and we haven't discussed them in three years because pram that -- president obama fixed the problem, and it's all false. really he did nothing of the sort. he just inched the door a little bit more open from what george bush had done.
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barack obama on vaccines, unfortunately, didn't do a lot better. when he was running for office in 2008, here's a quote, direct quote from him: we've just seen a skyrocketing autism rate. some people are suspicious that it's connected to the advantage seens, this person included. the science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it. service that was in 2008. this is wrong on so many levels that it's hard really to unpack how wrong this is. first of all, the medical community has never accepted this link, ever. this was only something that made the political rounds and has made its way into the maybe stream culture -- mainstream culture. medical doctors and scientists do not support a link between vaccines and autism. also the science was quote-unquote settled as early as 2002. -suspected that the scientists -- it was suspected that the scientist, andrew wakefield, it was suspected that his research was wrong as early as 2002. in 2011 he was just called an outright fraud by the british medical journal.
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however, in 2008, six years after a landmark study in 2002 conclusively demonstrated that there is no link between advantage evens and autism, here's barack obama pandering to an anti-vaccine crowd. did things improve when he took the white house? well, in 2009 you might remember the h1n1 influenza pandemic where we were all frightened that we were all going to get flu and die. and there was a vaccine shortage in the united states. in fact, i remember this quite well because, um, i was encouraging all my friends to go get their vaccines and my parents and everybody i knew. microbiologists are very scared of influenza, and rightfully so. about every 40 years or so we have a major pandemic, and sometimes they're very deadly. we're overdue for one of these pandemics, and so this is not fear mongering. i'm not a fear-mongering kind of guy, but influenza is something that keeps microbiologists up at
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night. so why was there a vaccine shortage in 2009? well, an overly cautious fda did not allow two things. now, this occurred under the obama administration. the first things they did not allow were addy haven'ts, something that extends the vaccine supply. so it stimulates the immune response so you don't feed as much vaccine if you add anage haven't. this is not a controversial technology. it's used in europe, okay? if it's used in europe, it's not a controversial technology. [laughter] that was not allowed. secondly, at the last minute they ordered a switch from multidose to single-of dose vials. why? the reason is because single-dose vials have less thimerosal, the chemical which contains a little bit of mercury that the anti-vaccine crowd says this causes autism, okay? in 2009 this has been thoroughly
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debunked for years, and yet obama's fda gave in to that. and partially, as a result, we had a vaccine shortage. what was the outcome of the 2009 h1n1 innewspaper wednesday saw? 61 million americans ended up becoming infected, 274,000 hospitalizations and 12,370 deaths. now, i'm not a person who says barack obama killed all those people. i don't believe that. okay? i don't believe the fda killed all those people. but i do believe that our bad policies contributed to this outcome. and how many of these illnesseses and deaths -- and think of the money involved, the billions of dollars in health care costs that we just wasted simply because we weren't prepared in 2009 to deal with the h1n1 influenza pandemic. before we go back to more barack obama, let's stop and recall president george w. bush who was regularly accused of
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manipulating scientific data often by barack obama himself. promoting science is about insuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions base withed on facts, not ideology. president barack obama, march 9, 2009. well, did he live up to that? the bp oil spill was one of the biggest global oil spills in world history. how did the obama administration respond to this tragedy? quoting from the los angeles times, taken together two of the reports paint a picture of a government that was as unprepared to deal with the catastrophic spill as bp and the portrait of an administration that -- listen to this -- withheld information from the public and more or specifically scientists about how much oil was getting into the water, how much remained and how such estimates were calculated, appeared to contradict obama's
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pledge to make government more transparent and trustworthy. so his very promise that he will be better and more trustworthy in relying on facts and not ideology and not hiding things from scientists was violated not even two years into his presidency during one of the biggest environmental catastrophes our nation has ever seen. on the environment barack obama has a mixed record, and i'm not sure if all of you are going to agree with my positions on some of these issues, but i know that you guys are a great crowd, and i know you're not going to agree with me 100%. the good is that he eliminated the corn ethanol subsidy which i think everyone here would agree with. first of all, the corn ethanol subsidy is a waste of money. secondly, it produces nitrous oxide which is horrible for the environment. compared to carbon dioxide can, it has a global warming potential that is 900 times great or than carbon dioxide --
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300 times greater. so when you're making biofuels, let's just say this: the economists ran an article called biofools, okay? that's their opinion on biofuels, they think it's a horrible idea. he did put in new limits on carbon emissions from power plants. i support that because i think we should transition to natural gas because coal is very pad for the environment. not only are you releasing carbon, there's also a lot of heavy metal toxins. they have whole lakes which they set aside just to dump waste into. it's a nasty process, and if we can get into natural gas, that's a much better -- that's a win for everybody. especially since it's cheap. okay. that's where barack obama's good policy on environment ends. the bad was he has still to this day no comprehensive climate change legislation. he's spent all this time doing obamacare, and in addition because he wanted to do cap and trade which i'm not in favor personally of cap and trade, i think a carbon tax might be a
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better policy, but cap and trade is not something that i think is a good idea. that was the main thrust of their climate change legislation that barely passed the house, 219-212. it was so unpopular in the senate that they didn't even take it up, okay? joe manchin had my -- he's a senator from west virginia, very famously took the cap and trade bill and tacked it to a tree -- he's a democrat -- and he shot it with a rifle. [laughter] so that pretty much killed the legislation. i mean, he literally killed the legislation. so that's, so that's why that didn't go on in the senate. also even though we have now let the ethanol sub subsidy for corn expire, we have not waifed the ethanol -- waived the ethanol mandate for fuel. so still your gasoline has to have 15% ethanol blended into it. that is a horrible idea. it's a horrible policy. the reason is because there's people on the other side of the
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world right now who don't have food, and when we're diverting our corn to make gas for our cars, people on the other side of the world starve. so it's not a good policy at all, and we should end the ethanol mandate -- at least waive it for this year for, at the very least. now the ugly. cash for clunkers. clunkernomics. new cars under this program, so, obviously, if you're going to trade in your old car and get a new car, it's going to have better gas mileage simply because technology is increasing. an analysis showed if clunkernomics had not existed, the new cars would have only been.23 less efficient. it saved the u.s. an estimated 12,000 barrels of oil per day, but we use nine million barrels of oil per day. so this is a literal drop in the bucket. there was a shrm boost in --
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short-term boost in car sales followed by a quick dropoff, no long-term increase in car sales, and the cost to the taxpayer was $24,000 per car. i'm not an economists, but that sounds like a really expensive car. [laughter] >> adding insult to injury, it brought up the price of used cars which meant that people with older cars held on to them longer and probably eradicated whatever benefit there was. >> right. that's the other thing, there are carbon emissions to building new cars, right? and we took old cars and smashed them. we -- and then barack obama also ignored, we also know that one of the common complaints was that george bush consistently put the motives of industry above the motives of the epa because he was big oil and big business, and, you know the rig rah ma role. barack obama did the exact same thing. the epa said we need to decrease smog levels because smog is killing people, and barack obama
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said, no, because it's not good for business. so he did exactly what he accused george bush of doing all throughout his campaign. on the issue of nuclear waste, i'm going to probably try to get through these next couple of slides here quickly because we've got some really juicy stories from the west coast that i have to get for you. barack obama is not relistically dealing with nuclear power. this has been a political football for years ever since the reagan administration. he didn't want the nuclear waste plant built out in the east, tom foley didn't want it built in the west, some texas congressman didn't want it in his state, so that's how nevada got stuck with it. it's been studies, however, this land, yucca mountain's been studied for about 25 years, and the facility's already built, and it cost about $13.5 billion. it is safer to store nuclear waste in one central location in the middle of nowhere -- apologies to north nevada -- tho
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scatter it around the country which is what our current policy is. our current policy is when the nuclear power plant is done with the fuel, you put it into a fuel pool or a dry casket and sit it on site. that is less safe than just taking it all in and sticking it underneath a mountain in nevada. however, the chair, gregory crash coe -- originally appointed by jrnlg w. bush and elevated to chairman by barack obama and a former senator to anti-yucca mountain senator harry reid, he withheld information from his colleagues on the nrc. from "the wall street journal," strategically withheld information from his colleagues in an effort to stop work on a controversial proposed waste dump according to a report by the agency's internal watchdog. this occurred, by the way, four months after barack obama took office. he had no intention on dealing with nuke hard policy. not a priority, and he shut down
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yucca mountain because harry reid was in a tough battle in 2010 which he won narrowly against sharron angle. and then, final hi -- i think this is finally for barack obama, on solar power. obama says he wants to promote green energy. well, he has two very bad policies if that's the case. one was playing venture capitalist with your money. solyndra, which we all know went bust and lost $500 million, was a technology that actually might work. it's called sigs, these are expensive panels, but they're more efficient than the cheap solar panels we get from china. china uses amorphous silicone. so he decided, well, look, the price of silicone is probably going to go up as it becomes more and more is and more in demand, so, therefore, we should invest many this new technology.
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well, that's not what happened. the price of silicone came crashing down, and along with it solyndra's entire business model and along with it your $500 million. so that's bad decision number one. subsidizing technology when you should be subsidizing basic research. i am completely in favor of subsidizing basic research. i think that's an appropriate role for government. but once the technology launches into the marketplace, that's when the federal government should pack off and say, look, you have to make it on your own at this point. at some point solar power's going to be the energy of the future, the technology's just not quite there yet. maybe 10, 20 years from now. so "the washington post" basically said i'm not going to read this whole quote here, but the end of the line is that it gave an unprecedented glimpse -- this whole solyndra scandal -- gave an unprecedented glimpse into high-level maneuvering by politically-connected, clean technology investors. and that basically, um, you
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know, if it's true that bush -- and i don't know, i'm not an expert on george w. bush, but if it's true that he was, you know, invested into big oil and all his pig oil buddies, it is equally true that barack obama brought in big solar as soon as he took office. his second bad policy, remember that he says it is a goal for us to advance solar power. so that makes a 31% tariff on chinese solar panels a little bit head scratching. obviously, trying to save pace a little bit -- save face a little bit, so he wants to protect the american consumer. unfortunately, when you slap a 31% tariff on cheap solar panels from china, you have the impact of not installing solar panels in this country. so he says he wants to support the technology and then slaps a tariff on china for doing that. and i wrote a piece called "if you can't beat 'em, tax 'em." so you decide, is president obama pro-science?
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or is he just another politician? now, now the really fun stuff. you guys are isolated. i always think d.c. is kind of a reasonable city in a lot of ways because it's kind of, you know, it's near virginia, it's kind of in the south, a lot of good hometown valuings. come out to the left coast sometime. [laughter] come out to the west, and you'll see a whole different set of values. so i live in seattle, i've been to portland frequently, and i love san francisco, and these are all great cities. are they bastions of good science policy? so in seattle what we called snowmageddon, december of 2008 we had a big snowstorm. heaven forbid, you don't use salt in seattle because that's bad for the environment. particularly, they said, it was bad for puget sound. it's a saltwater estuary. so adding a little bit of salt to a saltwater estuary, probably okay. the salmon will be all right. [laughter]
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instead, instead you take plows, and you pack down the snow and sprinkle sand on top. now, how many of you if here think that strategy will hurt? it did not. in fact, what we had was ice potholes where you'd be driving on top of this ice rink with sand on top, and potholes would form in the ice, so you would be going up and down like -- it was the boris thing i've -- worst thing i've ever seen. and that's actually worse for the environment. sand is one of the things you want to keep out of streams because sand will get woo the gills of -- will get into the gills of fish. well, that didn't work out well. mayor greg nichols was bounced in the primary and was replaced by a guy who immediately fixed the problem by just cutting out road lanes and put anything bicycle lanes instead, so i think that -- i guess that fixed it. we have also implemented a plastic bag ban that does absolutely nothing to help the environment.
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you'll see poor birds and turtles choking on plastic in the ocean. that's not usually due to blastic bags -- plastic bags. that's usually due to fishing gear, to things that were left over usually from fishermen. that is not usually due to safeway plastic bags or whatever grocery store you guys have around here. plastic bags are also energy efficient. if you want to use a cotton bag instead, you have to use it 173 times to even break each from an energy standpoint. moving on to portland, portland's motto is keep portland weird with. that is not a problem. [laughter] water flouration is something that was invented in 1945, grand rapids, michigan. it is seen as one of the best public health triumphs because people who cannot go to the depptist, people who are poor -- dentist, people who are poor can at least get some flour i'd in their -- flour ride in their water. it's a great thing. 200 million americans get flour
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dated water. portland rejected this in 1980, and oregon subsequently ranked near the bottom in children's dental health. many portlanders treasure their city's quirk ri distinctiveness, said "the new york times," and i agree -- [laughter] being toothless is quirk ri and distinctive. and, basically, i'm not going to read this quote from "the new york times"esing but basically, a couple weeks ago the city counsel finally approved fluoridation to begin in 201. really, a round of applause for portland for joining the 20th century. i love portland. if you're going to san francisco, be sure the bring a plunger. low-flow toilets -- not san francisco's fault, actually signed into law by president george h.w. bush, bush 41 -- which required low-flow toilets. now, the impact of that is sludge will back up in the city's sewers, and the mission
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bay neighborhood, quote of of-unquote, smells like rotten eggs. they're using $14 million of taxpayer money to dump bleach into the sewer to clean up a problem that previously simply did not exist. bleach isn't, also, a very friendly chemical, by way. all right. so who can you trust in science? well, i think that scientists, medical doctors and, yes, even government regulatory bodies like the fd a&e pa are usually right. where i will mispick with government -- nitpick with government regulators, i sometimes think they are a little too cautious. we haven't gotten approval on e-cigarettes and they should be healthier than regular cigarettes and they're dragging their feet. on real clear science we like to link to the best science news, the best science analysis. and that is, that's what we do. and so we try to put aside the partisan bickering and focus on what is good science and what is
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good science policy. so read major science journals, read the ab abstracts, those are good things to look at. and, you know, when you look at a position like gmos, which side do you trust? the american medical association, the national academy of sciences, the world health organization among many others, or do you trust peta ask and the environmental work withing group, groups that are for the most part anti-gmo and anti-technology. always look which groups side with the technology. genetically-modified foods. so my final thoughts, i'm not into keep l scores essentially. my book is not a response to chris mooney's book. it's simply saying, as paul harvey would say, what's the rest of the story? so we're just saying, look, yeah, the right thing gets some things wrong, but to pretended the left is great on science isn't true, and the point of our
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book, revealing where the left goes wrong on science. data is data, it doesn't have a political agenda. and we have to learn to distinguish science from policy. you know, when scientists dabble in public policy, they sometimes get into trouble. so you need to learn to distinguish what the science says from what a scientist speaking as a public policy advocate says. and if we can put aside our political differences, we should be able to agree on the lessons that science hands us, so you can handle the truth. apologies to colonel jessup. and i'd like to thank john and kenneth who have been instrumental in getting me here, so thank you very much. and just one final slide n. this book we talk mostly about barack obama here. this book covered -- that's just one chapter, okay? the so you imagine how much information we've packed into this book. we talk about progressivism, the obama administration, organic food, the future of food, environmentalism, clean energy, solar power, vaccines, big
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pharma, european science, gender research, science journalism, false equivalence, war on presence and the important issues for 2012 and beyond. that's it, that's all i have. thank you very much. [applause] >> -- for those who didn't buy the book, it's worth the investment and read. i have a bunch of questions, but i'm going to go to the floor after only asking one of them. could you talk a little bit about how natural gas went from being clean burning natural gas, the darling of the environmental movement, to the point where we now have a war on natural gas from the mainstream environmental movement? >> yeah. that's a great question. and john -- [inaudible] has a great answer to this. so natural gas used to be a darling of the environmental left. they used to say, hey, we should be burning this. in fact, you see buses driving
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around that are full of natural gas. that's because of them. now all of a sudden natural gas is bad. why? well, in their vision natural gas was simply a transitional fuel to wind power and solar power which is fine, that was a fine strategy. but what we have since discovered is that we are sitting on a accelerate tabling gold -- veritable gold mine of natural gas. and because of that, they are now freaked out that their wind power, their solar power idea is going to be set aside in favor of natural gas. and so they are now demonizing fracking and natural gas was they want their wind and -- because they want their wind and solar power. >> so we have microphones circulating. i will will ask you when you ask a question, when you're called on to, please, state your name and affiliation. and remember the jeopardy rule and please ask your question in the form of a question. [laughter] if you do not follow the jeopardy award, you will not advance to double jeopardy or final general -- jeopardy during
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the question period. so we'll start right down here in the front. >> diane, clinical psychologist. it's wonderful that you're encouraging facts should be agreed on by all sides. on the plastic bag question, though, what, what about that huge floating continent of plastic in the pacific? >> yeah. so that's actually not a bunch of plastic bags. the pacific -- you're referring to the pacific garbage pan patch. it's more like microscopic and small particles of plastic. it's bad. like, we don't want this there. that's a very bad thing. so people can pollute the planet. that becomes a problem with the food chain, with small organisms eating those plastic, then large organisms eating that, so it bioaccumulates. yes, that's a problem. but plastic bags from safeway don't seem to be the big contributor to this problem. >> i'm just finishing up an
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article on this because i've written about it myself before. um, it's not -- the plastic b patch is exaggerated in size and what's actually in it, as alex pointed out. the problem, though s that the left doesn't like to say but compared to what. so plastic bags you say, well, plastic bags are bad. but that organic cotton bag you got that was shipped by plane from turkey isn't exactly good for the planet. and the fact that it carries and transmits decide from your vegetables to other foods, grow cans bacteria in the trunk of your car from leaking meat juices and the like, and recently they implicated a cloth bag in infecting a women's soccer team with nor row virus. ..
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campaign and involvement in science. do you feel that his administration can be more successful in some of the topics that you brought up and how much of this is an effective part of what the reelection campaign in science right now we don't hear
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as much of it in the dates and we haven't heard as much of it in the debates, cities think that is going to become more prominent in the vice presidential debate in the subsequent again romney versus obama? >> i don't think science ever plays a larger role and for me that is unfortunate. dividing that al gore would have been a better president? no. someone who routinely exaggerate some of science offends me as a scientist because that isn't what scientists are supposed to be. it can be a truth regularly took information and what we would stretch it to the point of lowercase its still scientifically somewhat accurate who and it's really stretching it here and he did that over and over and over again. his 25 rise in the sea level is assuming the dreamland ice sheet melts and no one knows if that
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is going to happen or not there's a lot of melting the summer, you know the arctic didn't have much ice at all so this is a problem but it isn't useful to exaggerate which is what he regular leaded and when you are caught exaggerating the problem use the credibility and the science loses credibility, so no i don't think al gore would have been a letter spokesman because i don't think he did a good job at all in the field. >> i actually was here in washington in 1988i think it was so it does have some -- i
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question is not the solution side what can a party is due to help, or reduce the presence of the misinformation about science and public debate particularly when we suggest it is often strongly connected to the cultural sensitivity how can you break through those things. the union comes due to scientists is genetically true, and they take a neutral stance on the nuclear power, which to me is an anti-nuclear power because that's like saying what is your feeling on bunny rabbits with. you can't be neutral on bunny rabbits. so i think the unit of the concerned scientists has done a disservice by -- i saw a couple of the results of a failure to yield a genetically modified
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food is increasing crop fields. the crop fields of the united states if carl that higher but we already have a great technology. in the third world, the developing world are thomas lee successful. increased crop yields 40 or 50% and profits for farmers they're taking this technology and the more balanced discussion is definitely needed and we need to stop focusing just on the rest and focus also on the pros because there is nothing is a risk free technology. cell phones cause rusk. i'm talking on my phone i don't look to see if the bus is going to hit me when i'm crossing the street every technology carries a risk of a technology also carries a pro and a balanced discussion by scientific discussion balances the pros and cons and makes a decision from their. >> very good.
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we have had a forest of hands. the gentleman back here in the blue shirt. i try to give the microphone a little bit of exercise period estimate you tried to portray this antisentiment as a left right issue. i've looked into this quite extensively and all of the polls show that even when divided, people are concerned about these gm gm azo and they have a scientific study that just came out. first long-term study of its kind and we can disparage it. okay. let's assume that it is not that. let's assume that there were not enough rats in the study. if people are concerned, why don't they have the right to see a label? they can make a decision of whether they want to read it is as simple as that.
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so there is a lot to deal with. the professor in france is an antiactivist. he has a book coming out about why we should not have cmos. he has a movie coming out about why. >> he was a pro gm though activist. what does that mean? >> okay. so, let's buy it into the details of the study. they use a strain of rats prone to getting cancer, and then invade use a very small sample so you have a control group of ten rats and another group of maybe ten or 20 which have a lifetime risk of getting cancer of around 50 to 70%. okay? so when you design a study where the rats are going to massively get cancer, and you need to have a study that looks at thousands of rats. that's one thing. the idea also that this is the first long-term study isn't true. there have been other long-term studies which said they are perfectly fine.
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they also have a long-term studies looking at herbicides that said that was perfectly fine the this was in the first time. >> let's assume this study isn't valid, that there is no scientific study here. they were allowed into this country in the 90's. there is no study by the fda. >> if you look back at the restrictions there was a moratorium put in place simply out of precaution. and that was in the 1970's. the 70's and early 80's so it isn't to say that no studies have been done in the modification. they have been all the way along and the other thing i think is not that people can have their opinion but that the promotion of the antiagenda is much heavier on the left than on the
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right. individual people that are both one freakin' senator hee-haw the last women from being the information to be a skill levels. all you have to do is look at the cigarette tax to point that out and first the also -- is the one side, so, you have your label that says maybe the gm of the company won't be able to say the improved nutrition because of the gm of. it's not as you think is of the government says that you can label positively but not negatively but not positively and it has to be this much of your label it is very easy to get that agenda taken hold of by the activist groups. >> it is also worth pointing out that 75% of the food in the grocery store is genetically modified. okay? >> wouldn't you agree that people should at least have the right to know? >> i am telling you right now most is modified.
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>> you 88 for lunch. [laughter] >> we want to make a decision shouldn't we have a label if we want to see -- if we decided that this is not for us? >> this a false label. >> it's not a false -- >> let's move on, please. the gentleman right here in the front. >> over here? >> my name is peter levin. i agree with most of your science, but i have a real problem of how you would choose to interpret some of this. i wrote the statement for senator connie mack when he went to the floor to defend the transfers, and he was a conservative republican in the leadership coming and we know perfectly well we were not going to have any problem with the democrats on this and the point of the were going to the floor and doing this was, as he said
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you mean they want me to ban the technique? i can't than the technique. and so, the whole question of emphasis on what happened like to allow more of a lines and that, there is a political reality to this game, and we were doing it to get a bunch of republicans cover to vote with us because we knew that they would follow. akaka on a number of things you slant things that i don't think our fairfax. they had a drug of real and something happens the fda is terrible they say that it's too slow. this goes on repeatedly on their bills if your conclusion is i'm showing that barack obama is back on science and not as good
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as george bush because i don't think that you can draw from what you actually done. what question would you like to ask? >> i am more by is on that than i appear. [laughter] the left and right are bad at science when it comes down to it. the point of the book was not to take science. we say this to about the introduction. this isn't the point of the book to take sides. the reason we wrote the book is to say that when the left side and the political spectrum and says we are pro science, we are going to examine that plan coming and that was the point of this to examine that is the left pro science i wouldn't disagree with that. it is non-partisan and politics should be taken out of the
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process as much as possible. it isn't a complete reality. you can't completely do it but that is the point. i'm not trying to say bush is better than obama. that is in the point. >> [inaudible] >> i'm going to guess that is george bush. >> we have a mandate for fuel that nobody can manufacture for not buying the fuel that nobody can manufacture. >> this lady in the purple. >> i really appreciate your efforts and i am with you on promoting teen science. i'm a philosopher and historian of science and recently retired from the national science foundation. you haven't persuaded me not to worry about plastic residue in a baby food and you haven't persuaded me not to worry about pesticides, but i agree we should look at the data. i do want to ask though, and
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seriously with curiosity, not an argument about fracking it seems apart from the political motives which we do not need to debate, isn't fracking a bad use of water? >> well, it is one's use of water. we use 49% of the water nation -- nation's water supply for formal plans to generate electricity as a pretty regular use of water, like half of the nation's water supply a list to doing that. is it a good idea for pollution is it set up? if the water table is your and where you are fracking as we down below that which is often times the case, the idea that you were going to pollute the ground water is pretty minimal and all of these policies are overseen by government regulators. they don't allow people to drill wells willy-nilly without any oversight and this is a process
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that's been going on since the 1940's it's only been recently in the news last year that we have been doing this for 70 years. it isn't a new technology but we've gotten better added. it's creating a huge revolution and gas production. it's not a new technology and it is furthermore one that evolves over time so the recycling rate for water has been escalating dramatically they would basically use air and profits instead of water so the companies already have a reason to recycle which is to say bringing in the new forms of water and the states having to treat their water to dispose of it has its waste. so, you can't say that fracking is a bad use of water because in a sense it doesn't exist and it's going to evolve and technology over time. so you'll see changes in the amount of water that you use
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very quickly. >> the gentleman back here in the red shirt. >> paul, a physician. the amount of the ratio of autism is five [laughter] one although there are studies on autism and the risk of certain circumcised males versus uncircumcised. chronic pain affects 9% of the adult population, and dni each did a study that shows chronic pelvic pain has cardiovascular disease through psychiatric conditions and erectile dysfunction. they collected certain circumcision data in that paper that has permitted that data from the publication. the cdc called the publication biased. is there someplace this correspondence can be published so that people can review this and add to the question about circumcision as a long-term risk, because circumcision is being promoted universally for hiv prevention. they came out recently with circumcision.
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>> i have never heard of a link between circumcision and autism. >> you have to look at it. it hasn't been looked at. you don't think it could be looked at? is this ideology tromping sign-ins'? >> all i am saying is i have never heard of that. >> yeah, i've never heard of that and if that is a biological mechanism -- >> if you haven't heard about it, if you haven't published correspondence, i can provide you the correspondence and aei the correspondence. >> can we move on to the gentleman right there in the back, nick shultz? >> nick shultz here at aei. thank you for stimulating the presentation. i have two questions for you if you wouldn't mind. the first is if you could talk about -- we are talking about to some extent the politicization to science, most of what happens
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in search of public policy discussions. i wonder what your thoughts are on the politicization of science and academia, and if there has been, say, a slight -- i don't want to for lack of a better word say corruption -- of some scientific disciplines because of the interactions with the sights and mike climate science but there could be other examples. >> i actually just wrote -- i would find it hard to believe that it's in the gm know because the biological and the chemical and the physical science are about as far removed from the political ideology as you can possibly imagine. mauney daily routine at the lab is to grow bacteria and then do very bizarre things to them and then get results from that. my political philosophy played no role in what i did on a daily
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basis. so, i would say that on biology, chemistry, physics, politics probably plays a very little role. on the social sciences, yes it's hard to imagine when a field like sociology is 40-1 that doesn't affect the quality of the research that comes out of the field. and economics, by the way -- which is considered the conservative social science -- democrats have them out numbered 3-1. it's hard to imagine that doesn't play a role in the social sciences. >> to defer a little bit, doesn't seem to be a problem and there's a high profit potential for the research products leading to high levels of retractions? is becoming more and more better understood as there was a recent study to look at why the papers were retracted and the found 75%
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of them were actually intentional fraud. but in the overall -- >> they found 2500, approximately 2500. that was out of 25 million. the retraction reed is like a 0.1%. it is extremely low. >> hi, my name is -- is this on? >> my name is jeff schrader and i work for the natural gas industry. i would like to address the water issue and then a quick question on the wealth that uses about the same amount of water on the golf course in about three weeks with that energy we are producing a lot more natural gas that's creating a tremendous amount of jobs in this country and bringing manufacturing back. so, it kind of goes back to what you're saying on the trade-off and the other factors. i did have a question that you mentioned on corn ethanol that creates are other ethanol
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creative from nitrous oxide? >> i don't know about that. i do know there are other biofuels that have, and one of them ironically enough is the genetically modified algae which is able to take carbon dioxide and convert it into fatty acids which is the soul, by yo de seóul so there are other -- don't lump all of the biofuels together because they are not all the same converting corn into ethanol seems to be a bad idea there are other biofuels that may have potential. >> am i terse oxide is the least of the problems of you look at the loading oceanic dead zones and the waterways and the corn area massive amounts of water and sky rocketing food prices as well. when the riots have been for food.
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>> next. >> actually there is a question that i want to ask about real quick. the deep water horizon situation, you mentioned they withheld information about what was likely to happen. you know that as well. marine biologists we know that the ocean is actually quite resilient to things like wheels bills and the like. but can you talk about do you know the review panel recommendations over the moratorium? >> i am not familiar with that. did you look into that at all? >> i just wondered if you were up on that because people would find it delineating to notice that -- basically when they had the panel on what they should have the moratorium, the panel said no. the obama administration reroute the recommendations, and later all of the people on the panel can now, virtually all of them came out and said we said no. >> all right. let's go here then.
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>> you talked about the politicization of science and criticized of the regulation and the fda. in the case of the gmos, there is no regulation. there is a blank slate -- >> ask questions, please. i don't want to have a debate between one person in the audience and -- >> what would you suggest if there is no regulation, what would you suggest to the length about gmos and what kind of regulations other than having montana itself to the regulations and refusing to allow independent researchers to test the patent? >> the fda's current policy i think is true that the company usually does their own testing. that is my understanding of it. do you know -- you have any more insight on that? >> a lot of companies do their own testing because they have a liability to worry about, and also they are required to of the regulatory approvals before they can commercialize their crops. so, the research is done.
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but of course that is what you want is because they actually know the technology better. you wouldn't want that testing to be done by somebody that of and understand the actual technology to make the genetically engineered product. specter is also something else -- when you said there is no regulation, that isn't true. the fda has a policy, and it is on a substantial equivalent. what the essentially ask is if you have a genetically modified crop and to have a conventional crops, does the genetically modified crop match the original crop nutritionally, okay? that is essentially the question. the same nutrients. are there toxins? is their something that is bad about it? >> the fda has not determined that. >> if you would like to have an independent review to do that, maybe that is a reasonable reform. but here is what the fda policy is. so, what i am trying to do is explain to you with the policies. he said they don't have a policy. they do have a policy and it is
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called the substantial equivalent. what they will then do if they determine that a food does not meet substantial equivalents, then it is subject to full fda approval, and not only does the fda have a say and, if you want to go out and plant it outside, the usda and the epa also get involved. >> can you expect to get a fair hearing. >> [inaudible] at the fda she's a former montana -- >> we may cut off the with mic for the first time in six years i've been here. >> you have of five or six or seven questions. >> can we have an actual question in the form of a question? this lady here. >> i think it's on. >> it is? okay. going back to what paul asked earlier, we can talk about all of the problems and which side is doing which things.
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but what can you recommend in solutions either from the scientific community or politicians in general public. >> that is the 64,000-dollar question, and to address your first question that isn't the game i like to play. i'm not interested in the point scoring and saying look they get a - ten i'm not interested in that. i don't care. michael as a scientist and as a science writer is to straighten the public record to get this wrong and evolution on climate change and they are wrong. the liberals on the modification that's the role i see myself playing on science and as for how do you improve the communication, that is the 64,000 of our question don't have a lobbying group in washington. there's a small handful of lobbyist groups and scientists don't tend to go out on matt
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when they are upset about something you don't see white lab coat people protesting it's not to appear biased and he mentioned earlier someone that studied the question because they were not accurate. so, how do we -- i am a scientist. how do we communicate without appearing to be biased? >> it's the most difficult tightrope walk you can imagine. giving the science if you feel compelled to say what policy you think they should follow saying now i am speaking of the policy advocate, and i think that we should do this policy. because that is a different discussion in the underlying science, and i think making that distinction crystal clear is important for scientists to do. >> we have a quick question. what do you think about the argument that carry both sides of every issue they are simply
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so overwhelmingly consensus oriented that you simply shouldn't cover both sides that is partially why for so long people believe they are called autism because the medical community and i am being quite serious when i said the medical community never even believed this i taught class is where i would bring them and say there are some concerns here with this and a professor in the back of the room said know there are not there are no concerns about this. part of that is the science journalists, not the ones doing most of the reporting it was general reporters so what do the general reporters duplex to get an opinion from the democrat and republican and that is the news of the day that doesn't work in science. you can't get here is the perlo vaccine physician and now we're gratified and antivaccine coke and hear what they say and that is now a balanced position it doesn't work like that in
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science, and to do better science journalism it helps to have scientifically knowledgeable people as science journalists, people that were former scientists. in fact it is one of the problems in the imploding media. the people that actually science writers are being let go and they are going back to general. >> i believe tim from guardian said the decline of science journalism is its own fault and when scientists to become bloggers can do a better job at science and an occasion than the science journal less than that is a bad thing for science journalism. i mean it's good for the public but from the established media, it is not good for them. >> have you had a question yet? down here. >> thanks very much for this excellent presentation. it's very interesting. i am from the new atlanta.

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